1.
Senbei shop daughter
2.
Restaurant trainee
3.
Daughter-in-law of a pottery shop
4.
The Dog of the Watch Shop
5.
cake shop clerk
6.
Translator friend
7.
Cleaning company president
8.
Folk craft shop customer
9.
The Detective of Nihonbashi

“There are several secrets and lies sleeping on this street.”

'2010 This Mystery is Amazing!' 1st place!
#1 on the 'Best 10 Mysteries Selected by Munye Chunchu'!
The original novel of the TBS TV drama series "Newcomer" starring Hiroshi Abe

“Just thinking about this street immediately brought a variety of people into motion.
If I were to draw one of them, I couldn't help but draw the people around them.
The dramas were connected one after another, like dominoes falling.
“The sense of accomplishment when the last domino was knocked down was something I had never experienced before as a writer.”
Keigo Higashino, the icon of modern Japanese literature and winner of the Naoki Prize, expressed his feelings upon publishing his novel “The Newcomer” as follows.

The Ningyocho district in Tokyo's Nihonbashi, which he chose as the main setting for this novel, is a place where the atmosphere of old Edo still lives and breathes. The author portrays the mysterious murders that occurred in this uniquely emotional area and the various mysteries that are revealed in the process of investigating them with his characteristically realistic descriptions and warm gaze toward humanity.
As of March 2012, this work, which recorded sales of 500,000 copies in Japan, was made into a TV drama series and aired on TBS TV in Japan. It achieved great success with a peak viewership rating of 21%, and even spawned a sequel, the movie "Kirin no Wings - Theatrical Version Shin-chan."
Additionally, it was selected as the #1 in "This Mystery is Amazing 2010" and #1 in "Bungei Shunju's Best 10 Mysteries", establishing itself as a masterpiece that marked another milestone in Keigo Higashino's career as a writer.

Mineko Mitsui, a divorced woman in her 40s living alone in an apartment in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, is found strangled to death.
With no one, including her family, knowing why she came to live in this place where she had no connection, Kyoichiro Kaga, a newly appointed detective at the Nihonbashi Police Station, is assigned to the case.
He investigates the murdered woman's whereabouts by going around the shopping districts of Ningyocho Street where she often visited.
In this street full of the atmosphere of the old Edo period, Kaga asks merchants who run traditional sweets and folk craft shops about Mitsui Mineko. She discovers that they are all giving false testimony, and as she pursues the truth, she ends up confronting unexpected secrets that each of them is hiding.


The novel is written in a series of nine short stories that culminate in one large picture.
These nine short stories were serialized in the literary magazine 『Novel Modern』 published by Kodansha in Japan over a period of five years, starting in the August 2004 issue. Each short story is complete in itself, yet is organically and closely connected to the others.
In Ningyocho, an old-fashioned street with a strong Edo atmosphere, people from a senbei shop, a watch shop, a restaurant, and a pottery shop live simply, embracing their own lives, and the characters in each short story are the people. As detective Kaga Kyoichiro, who has just been assigned to the precinct and is new to this street, approaches them with suspicion about the suspicious events happening around them, he gradually gets closer to the truth about the murder of a divorced woman in her 40s, called the "Kodenmacho Murder Case."
Despite serializing for such a long period of time, the author displays an incredible ability to construct stories by placing incredibly intricate foreshadowing and intertwining human relationships like a spider's web in each short story, ultimately converging precisely at a single point.


As can be seen from the title of "social writer" given to him, author Keigo Higashino writes about murder cases, but also focuses his attention on human issues, such as good and evil, justice, and family.
Therefore, while his work faithfully follows the essence of the mystery genre, it also creates a human drama that goes beyond the realm of simple mystery.
This is one of the main reasons why he is praised by so many readers.

『The Newcomer』 is a novel that displays these characteristics better than any other of his works, and readers are able to sense the author's tendencies first and foremost through the character of the main character, detective Kaga Kyoichiro.
Gaga is a former detective from the 1st Investigation Division of the Metropolitan Police Department, a group of elite detectives. He was a detective with "razor-sharp insight" who solved many difficult murder cases. However, he was demoted to a different station after appearing in court as a defense witness in a murder trial, leading to complaints from the bereaved family that the investigator's personal feelings were delaying the resolution of the case.
The protagonist detective, who is righteous yet never lets go of the string of humanity, defines the meaning of his existence with the following one word.


“Detectives don’t just investigate.
If someone is hurt by the incident, they will also be harmed.
It is also the detective's role to find a way to heal the victim.
… … (omitted) … … You know, there’s something I always think about when I do this work.
It is natural to catch the culprit who committed the heinous act of killing a person, but it is also necessary to thoroughly investigate why it happened.
“Because if we don’t figure it out, the same mistake could happen again somewhere.”

Words like "heartache" and "healing" ultimately reveal where the author's gaze is directed through the protagonist's dialogue.

Additionally, the author chose ‘love between family members’ as the starting point of all events in this work and the key to solving them.
Families who embrace each other.
In this work, it is the love between family members that triggers the incident, and also leads the incident into a labyrinth, but it is also the one that ultimately solves all the mysteries.
The author breathes the warmth of 'familial love' into a mystery novel that could easily become cold and bleak, and this goes beyond warmth and leads to an uncontrollable emotion.

Keigo Higashino's novel, "The Newcomer," which puts "humans" before "events," is a work that pioneered the new field of mystery, touching on people's hearts with gentleness rather than sharpness, and healing the hearts of readers through it.